


18:4

by alice_pike



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-26
Updated: 2013-08-26
Packaged: 2017-12-24 17:44:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 506
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/942807
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alice_pike/pseuds/alice_pike
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>"Behold, all souls are mine; as the soul of the father, so also the soul of the son is mine."</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	18:4

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [this prompt](http://pacificrimkink.livejournal.com/1613.html?thread=2276941) at the kink meme.
> 
> Summary is Ezekiel 18:4, hence the title.

At first it's just his son.

His only son, his _boy_ , the person he loved more than he loved himself. A reality he couldn't accept even a decade ago and then radio silence, nothing, not even a moment to cling to, to remember it by. There is no time, now that they have all the time in the world: There is too much to do and too many people who need him, and he can't be selfish now, he _won't_ be. He chose his son once, and this time, maybe, he'll be able to let him go like he couldn't before.

(He can't).

So at first it's just Chuck, insinuating himself into the room that Herc does not make, filling up the long-since-empty but never again hollow places on the edges of Herc's mind, the spaces where he fits like the missing piece of a puzzle. Herc wakes to a phantom touch and a lingering thought, his son still so _alive_ in the places he can't reach, the places he can't return to. But Chuck is there when he sleeps, and Herc's dreams are not entirely his own.

(Shared dreaming is a known side effect of the Drift, but Herc knows that is not what this is).

Because soon, it's not just his son, not just his flesh and blood claiming his sleep, taking up more and more space in his head. Sometimes his limbs feel heavy, his skin stretched taught over a skeleton he resides in, something just as familiar and equally as impossible. It burrows just as deep, comes to him just as much, and he shouldn't be surprised, not really: Striker was as much a part of them as they were of each other. Hell, maybe even more.

It goes on for months, stretches into a year, and those places in his mind are carved out now, permanent, the shapes of his loss filled with things that he will not get back. More often than not he wakes disoriented, unsure, doesn't know whose dream he's having, whether he has lost or is lost; and each time it takes him longer to claw his way out, to find level ground in his own head.

It doesn't bleed into his waking hours, and if he is conscious he can stop it, but he is losing the ability to differentiate between them, to know what is human and what is not. His mind is not his own and it belongs to them both indiscriminately, unknowingly. It is filled and it is filled and he does not know who is filling it, where one stops and the other begins, or even if such lines could be drawn.

(They _should_ be, Herc thinks).

At first it's just his son, but that has never been all there is, and he could never have Chuck first, and whole—not without something bridging the gap. He doesn't know why this would be any different.

That he has lost Chuck in more ways than one just seems like more of the same.


End file.
